Kaiser poll: Approval of ObamaCare falls to … 33%

AllahpunditPosted at 2:41 pm on November 22, 2013

A lower number than most polls, but not all. That ruinous CBS survey from a few days ago pegged support for O-Care at a breezy 31/61. Kaiser’s not quite that bad — they’ve got it at 33/49 — but the 16-point spread is the largest in two years.

Not only that, but click and scroll through their various graphs and the thing that jumps out at you is how stable Kaiser’s numbers on ObamaCare have been over time. There’s an occasional spike or dip, but since the law passed in March 2010, they’ve had opposition pegged fairly consistently at 3-5 points ahead of support. As recently as September, the split was 39/43. Then, the deluge:

No mystery as to who’s primarily responsible for the cratering. Democrats are doing their best to boost Obama and his boondoggle, but even some of them can only take so much deceit and incompetence. Blue line is Dems, red line is independents, gray line is GOP:

Note that those October numbers weren’t taken on October 1st, before the country had realized what a disaster Healthcare.gov was. They were taken between October 17th and 23rd, three weeks after launch and around the time that more reports on rate shock and plan cancellations were filling the media. (Fun fact: Right now, per Kaiser, more people say the media is biased against the law than towards it. That’s how negative the coverage has, necessarily, been over the past six weeks.) And still, despite all of that, Democratic support for ObamaCare actually increased between late September and late October. They stuck with him in circle-the-wagons mode as long as they could, but something changed between October 23rd and mid-November. Either they gave up on him and Sebelius ever getting their act together on repairing the website or the plain fact that O lied his ass off for years about people being able to keep their plans broke some bond of trust.

Here’s what RCP’s average of polls on ObamaCare looks like since the beginning of October. Again, support for the law stays reasonably steady for much longer than you’d think given the endless humiliating stories about website failures that ran throughout the last month.

The spread remains consistent at 10-11 points — until a week or so ago, when the lines start to pull apart. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just the cumulative effect of everything or maybe Obama’s shinola-eating press conference about his “fix” to canceled plans finally convinced people either that he doesn’t know what he’s doing or that he really was caught in a giant lie that sheepishly had to be undone somehow. In hindsight, giving that presser might have been a bad idea.

In lieu of an exit question, go look at the Kaiser graph being showcased by WaPo, indicating that a plurality of the public — 41 percent — expects that ObamaCare will have no impact on them or their family. That’s a reasonable assumption if you don’t know much about the law and think that the disruption will be limited to consumers in the individual insurance market. It won’t be once (if?) the employer mandate goes into effect next year. What’ll the numbers look like next November once millions more people realize this isn’t some other guy’s problem?